The Turnout

by Megan Abbott

  Marie always seemed ready to bolt, but never for long and never far. How far could one get if one still struggled to remember a bank card pin number, and left gas burners lit wherever she went.

  So, when Dara and Charlie did marry—at city hall, he in an open-collar shirt and back brace and she in a tissue-thin slip dress that made her shudder on the front steps—he brought with him a small trust fund from his long-deceased father, to be broken open at last like a platinum piggy bank on his twenty-first birthday. The amount was modest, but they used it to pay off the mortgage for the studio building, drooping ceiling and all. They owned it outright. It was theirs.

  We’ll do it together, he said.

  And Marie.

  Of course, he said. We three. We means three.

  * * *

  * * *

  It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn’t. And that was when everything went wrong. Starting with the fire. Or before.

  THE HAMMER

  Is it time? Those were the words humming in her head that morning.

  Their mother’s kitchen clock, its aluminum yellowed with grease, read six forty-five.

  She took a breath, long and wheezing, her body tight and heavy from sleep.

  Still, Dara couldn’t quite move from her seat, her palms resting on the drop-leaf table, the walnut whorls she’d known since childhood.

  That morning, she’d woken fast from a dream about the Fire Eater their father took them to see at the spring carnival when they were very small. The way the woman gripped the bluing torch, how the flames seemed to draw up her throat, her long face, her startled eyes.

  The dream was still in her, more or less, still fluttering her eyes, and when she rose from the table to turn off the gas burner, she waited three, four, five seconds to see the blue flame flicker and disappear.

  Marie, she thought suddenly. All these months later and she still expected to turn and see Marie, face pleated with sleep, stumbling toward her, empty mug outstretched.

  Tea in hand, Dara lowered herself back into her chair, then stretched her torso forward, arms out, her head dropping lower and lower, her arms reaching down her calves, grabbing her ankles, all the blood joining. All the nerves radiating.

  We have a different relationship to pain, their mother used to say. It’s our friend, our lover.

  When you wake up and the pain is gone, do you know what that means?

  What, they’d ask every time.

  You’re no longer a dancer.

  * * *

  * * *

  Dara,” Charlie called from upstairs, from their mother’s claw-footed tub, “aren’t you late?”

  “No,” Dara replied. Never, she wanted to add, reaching to fill her thermos, tea splashing, her joints aching as ever, the only way, some mornings, she knew she was alive.

  * * *

  * * *

  Madame Durant!” called out a boy’s voice, just breaking. “Is it going to be today?”

  It was Saturday and not even seven thirty. The front door of the Durant School of Dance wouldn’t open for another half hour, but the parking lot was already beginning to fill when Dara arrived, legs vibrating, face burning deliriously from her bracing walk to work.

  “Madame Durant!” the voice came again.

  Dara turned as the car approached, a porpoise-gray sedan with tinted windows.

  Inside, nestled beside his father, was earnest, sloe-eyed, fourteen-year-old Corbin Lesterio, his hair still shower-wet, slicked back like a silent movie actor, or a gangster. “Madame Durant, is it going to be today? The cast announcement?”

  “Yes,” Dara said, moving past the car, hiding a faint smile at his earnestness, so raw and plain. She picked up her pace, feeling their eyes on her. Corbin, one of the six boys to the one hundred twenty-two girls in the school, didn’t know it yet, but they’d chosen him as this year’s Nutcracker Prince. Or, rather, Dara had. Charlie hadn’t been feeling well and left auditions early, and Marie never interfered in casting, left it always to Dara, who knew it could only be Corbin, with his impossibly long arms and long, lovely neck.

  “Madame Durant! Madame!” came other voices, from other idling cars, heaters churning and windows fogging, of eager parents, a dozen mothers, their early morning hair scraped up into clips, their daughters’ buns bobbing beside them, their energy high and frantic. “Madame! Madame!” Their excitement as exhausting as their desperation.

  The energy—the constant buzzing of anxiety and distress, of hunger and self-critique—was always high at the Durant School, but today it was much higher.

  It was inevitable. It happened every year at this time, the chill in the air, the twinkle in all the girls’ eyes, their arms high in fifth position.

  It was Nutcracker season.

  * * *

  * * *

  A necessary evil, The Nutcracker was.

  It took over everything. Eight weeks of auditions, in-class rehearsals, on-site rehearsals, costume fittings, and final dress rehearsals with their partner, the Mes Filles Ballet Company led by Madame Sylvie—all leading up to sixteen live performances over two weeks at the Francis J. Ballenger Performing Arts Center, a steel-and-glass eyesore that transformed magically on December nights into a glowing gift box wrapped in dozens of yards of red-velvet ribbon.

  Eight weeks of stress headaches and fainting and nervous stomachs. Eight weeks of injuries and near injuries, jumper’s knee and growth spurts, bloody blisters and heel spurs.

  All of it hidden behind the glitter and cheap satin, the ruffles and netting and tulle, the three dozen wigs, powdered, sprayed, gilded, the backstage pinboard of faux mustaches for the toy soldiers, the wall cubby of caved-in rodent heads for the battle against the Mouse King. And all of it hidden again beneath thirty pounds of flame-retardant paper snow recycled every performance or, in the old days, shredded plastic-bag snow that got stuck in your eyelashes, that flew in your mouth, and at the end of every night, the crew rolled big magnets across the stage to pull out the fallen hairpins.

  Most of all, it was eight weeks of tears.

  The Nutcracker. The story was so simple, a child’s story, but full of mystery and pain. At her family’s holiday party, a young girl named Clara finds herself transfixed by her dark and charismatic godfather, Drosselmeier. He gives her a miniature man, a Nutcracker doll she sneaks into bed with her, dreaming him into a young man, a fantasy lover who ushers her into a dream world of unimaginable splendor. And, at ballet’s end, she rides off with him on a sleigh into the deep, distant forest. The end of girlhood and the furtive entry into the dark beyond.

  All the girls wanted to be Clara, of course. Clara was the star. There were crying jags and stiff upper lips and silent sobs among the dozens forced to play one of many Party Girls, Angels, Candy Canes. They wanted to wear Clara’s stiff white party dress, her flowing white nightgown. They wanted to hold the grinning Nutcracker doll like a scepter.

  This yearning, so deep among the young girls, was like money in the bank.

  Every year, their fall enrollment increased twenty percent because of all these girls wanting to be Clara. Soon after, their winter enrollment increased another ten percent from girls in the audience who fell in love with the tutus and magic.

  Never, their mother used to say, that vaguely French frisson in her voice as she collected the fees, do I feel more American.

  Privately, their mother confided she never cared much for Clara. She never does anything, a little dormouse of a thing. And she would read to them the original story, which was much darker, the little girl so much more interesting, intense. And her name in the story was not Clara, which means bright and clear, their mother explained, but Marie, which means rebellious.

  That’s me! Marie used to say every time their mother turned to the first page.

  Dara’s name, alas, had no such story. Their moth
er could never remember how she picked it, only that it sounded right.

  The irony, their mother told Dara once, is you’re the Marie.

  * * *

  * * *

  Madame Durant!” squeaked a voice, one of the nine-year-olds, as Dara moved past them all and in the front door of the building. “Madame Durant, who will be Clara? Who?”

  Because today was not only one of those nerve-shredding Nutcracker season days but, short of opening night, it was the day. The cast announcements when everyone would find out what Dara had decided the night before. Who would be their Clara, their Prince, their mechanical dolls, their harlequins, their itty-bitty bonbons and wispy little snowflakes.

  “I can barely stand it!” Chloë Lin lisped, clutching at one of her leg warmers, sliding down her shin as she ran. “If I have to wait any longer I’ll die!”

  The door shutting behind her, Dara took a breath.

  But each step Dara took up the staircase throbbed with that same feeling, that jittery energy.

  Or, as it turned out, it throbbed with Marie.

  * * *

  * * *

  BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

  The Durant School of Dance was full of noise, a sharp, focused banging that felt like a nail gun at Dara’s temple.

  BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

  It was a sound Dara knew well. She’d heard it thousands of times, ever since her sister was ten years old and their mother first raised her up on her preternaturally tapered toes. You, my dear, were made for en pointe.

  “Sister, dear sister,” Dara called out.

  And there she was, Marie, face flushed, legs spread on the floor of Studio A, taking their father’s rust-red claw hammer to a new pair of pointe shoes.

  “The claw returns,” Dara said, lifting an eyebrow.

  “It’s the only thing that works,” said Marie, holding out the shoe for Dara to see, its pinkness split open, its soft center exposed.

  Even when, as young dancers, they went through three pairs a week, their mother forbid the hammer. It was too rough, too brutal. It was lazy. Instead, one should stick the shoe in the hinge of a door, closing it slowly, softening its hardness, breaking it down. Marie never had the patience.

  “Look,” Marie said, showing off her handiwork, settling her finger inside the shank, poking it, stroking it. “Look.”

  Dara felt her stomach turn and she wasn’t sure why.

  * * *

  * * *

  Satin, cardboard, burlap, paper hardened with glue—that’s all they were, pointe shoes. But they were so much more, the beating heart of ballet. And the fact that they lasted only weeks or less than an hour made them all the more so, like a skin you shed constantly. Then a new skin arrived, needing to be shaped.

  As soon as their dancers went on pointe, Dara and Marie made them learn how to break them in, how to experiment, fail, adapt, customize. They’d sit on the changing room floor, their legs like compasses, their new shoes between them like a pair of slippery fish.

  Crush the box, pry up and bend the shank, bend the sole, soften it, make it your own. Thread a needle with dental floss—far thicker than thread—to sew in elastic bands and satin ribbons at just the right spot, a cigarette lighter on the ribbon edges to stop fraying. Pliers to tug out the nail, an X-acto to cut away the satin around the toes to make them less slippery. That was Dara’s favorite part, like peeling a soft apple. After, taking the X-acto and, thwick, thwick, thwick, thwick, scraping the shoe bottom, X patterns or crosses, giving it grip.

  It was all about finding one’s own way to fuse the foot to the shoe, the shoe to the foot, the body.

  The shoe must become part of you, their mother always said. A new organ, snug and demanding and yours.

  If you didn’t prepare them correctly, if you left out any step, took any shortcuts—too smooth a sole, too low an elastic—it could mean a fall, an injury, worse.

  Their mother told them stories of older girls hiding broken glass in other girls’ shoes, which sounded like a dark fairy tale, but was there any other kind?

  Ballet was full of dark fairy tales, and how a dancer prepared her pointe shoes was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself. It was often indistinguishable.

  * * *

  * * *

  BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

  Marie was not going to stop, her teeth sunk into her lip, her eyes unfocused. She was going to prepare one, two, three pairs.

  It was all ridiculous, a waste. Marie, Dara wanted to say, what are these even for? Marie, you’re a teacher now, not a dancer.

  And the little girls she taught were years away from going on pointe, their feet still clad in pink slippers.

  But Dara was too tired to scold. To say what her mother would have said, You are abusing yourself, ma chère. This is self-abuse.

  BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

  Marie would not stop until Dara finally unlocked the front door and the first students pushed through, a gaggle of chirpy eight-year-olds, two bursting into tears at the gossamer pile before Marie, at her gutted shoes.

  * * *

  * * *

  Everything was a mad crush that day, Saturdays always were, but especially now, with the class schedule overloaded to make up for audition time and their regular substitute, a sprightly college student named Sandra Shu, felled by a snapping hip that, at long last, popped.

  The air was thick with anticipation for the final cast list, which Dara, following their mother’s storied tradition, never posted before the end of the day. Otherwise, all afternoon she’d have to endure the crying and mute stares, the sullen faces and despair, the incessant needling of the chosen leads under whispered breaths.

  Still, with the pitch of The Nutcracker humming all ears, there were more than the usual share of fretful students, a turned ankle, a jammed thumb, two girls fainting from a secret diet of celery and watermelon juice, the student toilet choked with vomit, a boy’s dance belt come asunder, one girl teasing another about her body hair, the fine down emerging nearly overnight to keep her floss-thin body warm, and Dara losing her temper with Gracie Hent for crowding the other girls, or with the Neuman sisters for coming to class again in black tights. (Black tights like an Italian widow, their mother would say, tsk-tsking.) Pink tights, black leotard, hair fastened for girls; black tights, white tees for boys. The rules were so simple and never changed.

  Charlie came in late, moving slowly and warily after a session with his PT. Helga, Dara and Marie had dubbed her, with Marie often imitating an imagined Germanic patter at the massage table. (Elbow sharp as a shiv for my dah-link . . .) It didn’t matter that her name wasn’t Helga and she wasn’t German but some local mom who, as Charlie loved to tell them, had gone back to school for her degree to support her children and make up for a useless husband. For Dara and Marie, she’d forever be Helga, built like bull with hands of iron!

  During the hours of his absence, all the problems Charlie typically forestalled had accumulated. There was no one to handle the parents, the niceties, the back office schedule changes, the vomit- and then tampon-clogged toilet, and the boy dancer who wanted to talk, man to man, about how to maneuver himself into that dance belt. (Pull everything up and to the front, Charlie always explained, like it’s high noon.)

  And then there was Marie. Mercurial Marie, who had become even more mercurial of late. The morning hammering gave way to a kind of dreamy listlessness as she drifted between classes to the third floor, her upstairs bunker, playing raspy old 45s on her windup Cinderella record player with the handle shaped like a glass slipper. Twice, she missed the start of her own class.

  Late in the day, when one of Dara’s mild corrections made Liv Lockman run into the changing room to cry, Marie knelt down and pulled the girl’s sob-racked body close, nearly weeping with her.

  “Madame Durant,” whispered Pepper Weston, watching th
e spectacle from behind Dara, “is it true that the other Madame Durant—”

  “Mademoiselle Durant,” Dara corrected.

  “That Mademoiselle Durant sleeps in the attic now?”

  Dara didn’t say anything for a moment, then, glancing at the metal clock on the wall, announced, “Depêchez-vous. À la barre.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Eight months ago, Marie had moved out of their home, the one they grew up in, with its knotty pine and sloping ceilings and time-worn floors and side-sinking stairs and the smell, forever, of their mother’s Blue Carnation perfume. The only place they’d ever lived at all, every scuff and scratch their own.

  There hadn’t been a discussion or even an explanation. Marie just kept saying it felt right, stuffing fistfuls of clothing into a duffel bag and running down the stairs as if, Charlie later said, fleeing a fire.

  They both thought she’d be back in a day, a week. After all, she’d left once before, years ago. Left with a moth-eaten velvet rolling trunk of their mother’s, intent on traveling the world. But the world had taken a month, more or less.

  This time, however, it had been eight months. Yet she hadn’t gotten very far, camping out right here in the studio, up the spiral staircase to the third floor, amid the files and glue traps and old recital tutus shivering with dust. Using the powder room and its stand-up shower as her personal toilette, which didn’t seem sanitary at all. But Marie often gave off the grimy energy of someone never fully clean.

  Only once had Dara climbed the spiral stairs to see what accommodations Marie had made. It turned out she’d made hardly any. The banker boxes were merely shoved in the corner except for one she seemed to be using as a bedside table. There was a metal futon covered with their father’s pilling Pendleton blanket, a gooseneck lamp, a jade plant given to her by their longtime Nutcracker partner Madame Sylvie in the dormer window, and, on its ledge, a mysterious knot of crystals, a gift from Brandee Hillock’s mom, who practiced Reiki and promised to heal Marie’s troublesome right ankle.